Too seldom has this process brought new artists of significance to light. It has tended either to rediscover recognized practitioners, such as John Meyer (1943-2002) and Chris Johanson, or foreground those not truly ready for prime time.

In short, the SECA exercise seems to be more about educating potential museum benefactors - who begin by donating their time and enthusiasm - than about a talent search.

Trevor Paglen stands out in the present SECA artist quartet for several reasons. First, he has a well-earned reputation beyond the art world as an independent investigator of government malfeasance, particularly domestic surveillance and off-the-books military operations such as the kidnapping and "extraordinary rendition" of suspected terrorists.

But for their dates, his photographs of the night sky revealing the tracks of surveillance satellites might almost have found a place in SFMOMA's recent exhibition "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900." And as with the contents of that show, his pictures make us wonder whether they really need or call for placement under the rubric of "art."

Calling Paglen's work art might even defang it. Should we go even that far toward aestheticizing the evidence of official treachery?

Tauba Auerbach's work displays a keen intelligence attuned to some questions implied by Paglen's efforts, particularly about the ways information systems can create the very sort of distance they purport to erase.

To make "Static II" (2008), Auerbach photographed very close up an analog color TV image, then scanned the negative to generate a digital print. The outcome presents itself as something like a bargello textile pattern, almost unimaginable as the granular structure of television's engulfing illusions. A faint allusion to Monet's paintings of Chartres Cathedral winks within "Static II."

In other pieces, Auerbach has quietly touched Pop art reference points: the number paintings and prints of Jasper Johns and the Ben-Day dots stylized by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997).

But for all her work's intelligence and occasional visual punch, Auerbach has a cold touch.

Jordan Kantor also traffics in the aesthetics of distance in an utterly bloodless spirit.

A generation ago, a phalanx of young artists, inspired by elder renegades such as Philip Guston (1913-1980) and Charles Garabedian, took up "bad painting" as a way to re-enliven their art form. Kantor practices something more like dispirited painting, basing his canvases on classics such as Edouard Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882) or on unsourced photographs.

A couple of pieces, such as "Untitled (Lens Flare)" (2008)arrive at a sort of abstraction by depicting merely optical phenomena. But like all his work here, they evoke, and engender, an anomie that finds art and ideas alike drained of interest by - what? - information overload? Exhaustion by history? Too many art school courses? Whatever.

Desirée Holman brings plenty of energy and, in her drawings considerable manual skill, to a project on which they seem sadly misspent.

A reckoning of sorts through multi-channel video with the race and class insinuations of '80s sitcoms, Holman's "The Magic Window" (2007) looks like soft-core Paul McCarthy: a masked, costumed performance that tries to strip false niceties bare but merely exposes a desperate ambition at its own core.

Face of Our Time: Four connected solo exhibitions at SFMOMA by photographers Yto Barrada, Guy Tillim, Judith Joy Ross and Leo Rubinfien make up "Face of Our Time," a moving anthology of the ways history writes itself on the faces of those who make and suffer it.

Among the SECA award winners, only Paglen's work can stand comparison with the sober, grown-up impression this show makes.

Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada scans a human landscape under contradictory threats of development and abandonment in which social and physical facts seem to have a bizarre intimacy and interchangeability.

South African Guy Tillim immerses himself in the turmoil of African political aspirations and movements, delivering pictures that compensate in expressive detail for what they cannot convey discursively of the events they describe.

Judith Joy Ross' quiet portraits of anti-war protesters put before us individuals whose mien makes us imagine we might feel privileged to know them, whatever the facts of their lives.

Leo Rubinfien nearly dominates the show with large street photographs of people taken in cities that have experienced terrorism. Add these arresting unposed portraits to the list of essential post-Sept. 11 artworks: essential in their expressive summing up of the feeling of a sudden change of historical weather.